TAGORE’S PRAYER FOR FREEDOM
A Bengali polymath Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, writer, playwright, composer,
philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengal Renaissance.
He
was a modernist both in Bengali literature and Indian art and culture. His
devotion to God was very profound. His world-famous book Gitanjali is an anthology of sacred poetry. It
won him Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
Tagore
was born on 7 May 1861 and passed away on 7 August 1941, about six years
earlier than India became free from the British Rule.
Gitanjali
carries a song on the type of freedom which Tagore aspired for India. His concept of freedom was non-materialistic.
Like
the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) he believed:
Not
gold, but only men can make
A
people great and strong –
Men
who, for truth and honour’s sake,
Stand
fast and suffer long.
Tagore’s
prayer for India’s freedom appears at No.35 in Gitanjali. It reads as follows:
Where the mind is without fear and
the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from
the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards
perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into
ever-widening thought and action--- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let
my country awake.
Today,
the 15th day of August 2025, is the 79th Independence Day of India, yet
Tagore’s prayer has not become out of date. It needs to be whole-heartedly addressed
to God .
********
G.R.Kanwal
15 August 2025
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